


waiting for nothing (but you)

by ohmaggies



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Declarations Of Love, Established Relationship, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:28:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25728964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmaggies/pseuds/ohmaggies
Summary: It had been Nicky, woken first, reading from a battered copy of his favourite book balanced in one hand with the other delicately woven around Joe's overgrown curls, careful not to disturb them. Joe had woken safe and settled, sighing contentedly and hiding his face in Nicky's side.He had said, mouth full of Nicky's shirt, "Haircut?" and Nicky had snorted quietly, too genuine as he muttered back, "It suits you, I like it."
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 16
Kudos: 332





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i'm obsessed with this show, and in love with their love completely. it only felt right to write something for them! i have 0 friends so this is completely unbeta'd, and i haven't read the comics, only seen the movie about six times.

It's been two months since Joe last had a haircut, soft curls growing out past their usual length reminiscent of a couple winters he and Nicky once spent in a small Alaskan town. They'd woken to frost on the windows more often than not and spent every morning on their way out the door brushing snowflakes from their hair. He's not nearly as cold now as he was then, regardless of the bitter chill whistling through the air.

The last few mornings have settled in their bones like below zero temperatures do, leaving him and Nicky curled somehow -  _ impossibly _ \- closer than usual. It had been Nicky, woken first, reading from a battered copy of his favourite book balanced in one hand with the other delicately woven around Joe's overgrown curls, careful not to disturb them. Joe had woken safe and settled, sighing contentedly and hiding his face in Nicky's side.

He had said, mouth full of Nicky's shirt, "Haircut?" and Nicky had snorted quietly, too genuine as he muttered back, "It suits you, I like it." 

They'd laid together until later morning, simply relishing in the silence of each other's comfortable company. They've lived long enough to appreciate not quite the sleep-ins but lying together warm as snow piles up outside and leaves frosts on the windows, and the hours syncing up their gentle breaths to one another. 

The thought of spending each and every morning like this one leaves Joe smiling to himself, fairly unaware of Andy with her phone pressed to her ear for barely a minute.

"Joe?" Andy tightens her jacket around herself, the same jacket that only days ago was stained with blood that she spent too long scrubbing out of the dark leather. 

He merely hums in response as the last dregs of sunlight pour over them, painting the sky in delicate shades of pink and orange. Joe immediately wants to capture the beauty of it in his sketchbook, kept securely on his and Nicky's joint bedside table with dozens of drawings paying homage to the latter. None of them quite capture Nicky's beauty the way Joe's eyes do, but he's got the time to perfect it.

"Booker said he's on his way," Andy says, wiping her nose on the back of her hand as she shivers. The cold rattles through her lungs. She exhales a noticeable puff of white as distant voices face out, once hunched shoulders relaxing the slightest.

"Nicky?" Joe asks, hands secured in the pockets of his jacket.

Andy smiles and moments ago, it would've been tinged with blood from a particularly rough punch she took. He's relieved it's not. "He's okay, which means you can stop worrying, okay? He's as capable as any of us."

"I know he can take care of himself, that's not why I worry," Joe admits, squinting at the sun falling gently beyond the horizon. The afternoon sun is bright but not warm, and the two of them shiver through a breeze that slips in between the fabric of their jackets. "I'll always worry about him, Andy. Even standing here, without my Nicolo and without knowing he's okay, I don't know what will become of me if he doesn't show up. It would be like the greatest light in this universe had been so thoughtlessly snuffed out."

Andy's features soften for the briefest of moments, a shivering hand resting on Joe's shoulder. Her grief, burrowed permanently in a small chamber of her heart, forces it away from him before either is ready. "I know what you mean," she mutters.

"Quynh?"

She smiles, pained, and Joe makes note of the red risen in her cheeks, the shine in her eyes. "I keep asking myself if it'll ever stop hurting that she's gone and find with each year that it only gets worse. And I can't help feeling that I failed her, Joe - even before I stopped searching."

"You loved her," Joe reassures, and partly asks. 

"I did," Andy absentmindedly kicks up a small pile of snow, avoiding Joe's inquisitive gaze. "I loved her and I lost her. Sometimes I wish I had never fucking found her, maybe she'd still be alive or she'd be dead. But it wouldn't be on me, whatever death it was." 

"What happened to her wasn't on you, anyway, boss," Joe says, and Andy's eyes lock on him, intimidating to many but familiar to him. Each thousand years alive rests in the smooth lines of her face and in each setting of the sun that marks another day brutally survived; she's tired, rolling her shoulders to adjust her jacket and tidying her windswept hair with a careless comb of her fingers. "Nicolo would say the same, and Booker."

Andy merely glances away from him. "Booker wasn't there, he doesn't know what it was like."

"I was, Nicky was." They spent decades looking and turned up nothing, and it was the only battle they've ever lost, the only one they willingly walked away from. They couldn't look forever. "Quynh would've known you tried, Andy."

"And if that had been Nicky?"

Joe's eyebrows narrow, not in consideration but in pigeoning fear. "I have loved him for over nine hundred years and I will love him for over nine hundred more. He is the sole reason I bother taking breath most days. I would spend nine hundred years looking for him if it meant I got to spend one more loving him, and he loving me."

Not far away, tyres crunch through the snow and Andy immediately wipes at her face. Her cheeks are red and frost bitten, snowflakes vibrant in her dark hair, and Joe imagines he looks somewhat similar to her, huddled in on himself for warmth. Winter is a cruel month yet somehow not his least favourite, either for the excuse of wearing a comfortable jacket or for how close he can sleep wrapped around Nicky, or for distant memories of bitter winters in the faraway past with the love of his life; huddled in blankets on a porch watching the sunrise, hot breath kisses shared in the frozen breeze.

Nicky's pale cheeks are reddened from the cold before he even leaves the car, and Joe knows if he were to pull Nicky close he would be shivering under his thin jacket. He watches him berate the snow, kicking up tufts of white before he looks up, his irritable expression fading to one that Joe knows very well. It is the same one he gazes at Joe with each time they're together, a mix of awe and love and admiration that after all these years, continues to quicken the pace of Joe's heart with every time he sees it.

"Are you okay?" Joe asks, voice characteristically soft as Nicky approaches. 

Nicky smiles, a gentle tug at one corner of his mouth that is reserved solely for Joe and has been for the past nine hundred years. "I am okay," he says, as Joe places a hand carefully on his cheek. "Worried about you, mostly. Booker did not say it would be this cold here."

"I dressed for the occasion, don't worry," Joe's laugh is fond and unmocking. Predictably, Nicky's cheeks are cold and spread with a light pink, and his eyes warm with love. "You, however, my love, did not. You call that a jacket, huh?"

"It's… functioning," Nicky argues, no heat to his words and a shiver wracking his body. "I wasn't thinking much of the cold, I will admit. I didn't want to wait any longer to see you."

Exhaling a warm breath, Joe's thumb delicately brushes Nicky's cheek, the setting sun hitting Nicky's eyes at an angle that makes them harder to look away from than usual. There's something familiar in the gaze; in the way they deepen and darken, and in the way Joe instinctively wets his bottom lip.

"Who's the romantic now?" Joe murmurs, and cherishes the way Nicky's face brightens. 

"I blame old age," Nicky says, closing his eyes as the sun pours into them. Joe takes the opportunity to close the gap between them, his mouth finding Nicky's like instinct, like habit. And it has always been too easy to lose himself in Nicky and the gentle heat of their mouths together, but now Joe finds it near impossible to part the kiss, their shivering frames instantly warmed just by the contact.

"As much as I love kissing you, Joe, it is very cold here. Can we get back in the car, do you think?"

The first time he put his hands and lips on Nicky, he didn't want to have to imagine them belonging anywhere more than they belonged there, and all these years later, he's found they don't. Weapons are second nature now, driven by pure inclination than anything else. His hands wrapped around a gun is sometimes a jarringly not unusual sensation, yet touching and kissing Nicky is little less than what deep down is a driven  _ feeling _ of 'this is what I was made to do.' 

Destiny, Nicky would call it. The two of them, in each other's space - destiny, predestination, God's will. So many names for the simple  _ right  _ that is them together.

"Afraid of a little cold?" he teases, pressing a kiss to Nicky's forehead. Nicky scrunches up his face lightheartedly and Joe forces himself to take his eyes off him for a moment, and no matter how small a moment seems wasted not admiring Nicky. "I will admit," Joe then smirks, "as appealing as the idea of warming up together is, I think the boss is well past losing the feeling in her fingers." 

Over Nicky's shoulder, Andy flexes her shaking hand in a glove, her teeth gritted in frustration. Booker hovers at her side near the car, their voices too quiet to be heard but gazes finding Joe's. He offers a polite smile in return.

"We will continue this later?" Nicky's voice is barely a whisper. 

"Of course, after we find you an appropriate winter jacket," Joe says, humoured. Nicky simply stares, fighting off a smile. "You'll catch your death out here."

Nicky takes Joe's hand in his, fingers woven perfectly in one another's hand. Nicky's hand is painfully cold in Joe's and he merely tightens his grip, hoping to warm it as best he can for the man he loves

"I didn't suspect we'd spend so much time outside," Nicky shrugs, hair blown across his forehead with another sharp gust of wind. Joe brushes it back with his free hand, a gentle intimacy about it that invokes twin smiles from both of them "I much prefer the desert, Joe."

"I was just thinking I preferred the snow," Joe's expression becomes suddenly delicate, and Nicky raises a curious eyebrow. "If it gives us mornings like today's one, I would brave the cold for as long as I live. To bask in the warmth of your gaze with each and every sunrise. To simply spend time with you, Nicky, safe forever beside you, oblivious to any outside world that is not you and me."

Nicky squeezes Joe's hand in his and lifts it, pressing a kiss to the back of it. Despite the chill of his lips, Joe basks in the warmth of Nicky's affection.

"Joe! Nicky!" Andy calls, car door opening and slamming shut.

"Coming, boss," Joe answers, allowing himself the pleasure of kissing Nicky once more. They pause for a moment to breathe in one another's space, foreheads joined together. 

Nicky exhales. "I love you."

Joe closes his eyes, sinking into the moment for as long as time will allow. "I love you, too."

The sun sets against the horizon and they settle in the back of the car with Andy at the wheel, heat turned high as she and Booker sit near frozen in the front. In the back, Nicky rests against Joe, head collapsed against his shoulder and hands tangled together in their laps. 

It's warm and safe, and Joe traces Nicky's features with his eyes, from the curve of his nose to the careful ridges of his mouth, kissed by Joe so many times he's lost count.

In Joe's sketchbook, there are a dozen sketches of the man he's lucky enough to call his yet none of them capture him like this. The vulnerability of love, private to Joe's eyes. The flicker of his eyelashes as he sleeps and his hair falling in his face, his hand tight in Joe's even in sleep.

Even in sleep, he holds onto Joe as tightly as if he were awake.

Tired and cold, Joe closes his eyes and tilts his head back. With him and Nicky cuddled in the back of Booker's rental car, the rest of the world might as well not exist.

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Upon waking, Joe immediately considers giving up on the morning, with the sun nestling it's way behind clouds, and falling back to sleep against Nicky. Nicky, who will sense Joe's presence even in sleep and carefully curl their fingers together when Joe takes his hand.

It's been nine hundred years and still, he gazes at Nicky fast asleep and his breath is knocked from his chest with how beautiful he is.His eyelashes gently graze his cheeks and his eyes shift beneath his eyelids with a dream Joe will later hear about, but it's the soft way he sleeps, knowing he can fully relax and let his guard drop because Joe is with him. He has this way of stealing Joe's heart even while unconscious, with the simple way he trusts and loves.

Eventually Nicky will wake and Joe will tell him this, but for now they are content to lie here. One awake and admiring, and the other asleep and unaware. 

Joe shifts slightly, leaning over Nicky to retrieve his book and pencil from the wooden bedside table. There's a moment where Nicky's mouth opens with a small exhale and Joe stills, afraid of waking him and instantly pausing his endeavour. He's been trying to draw Nicky for many years, both successfully and unsuccessfully. Nicky, forever the kind hearted soul, looks upon every sketch with a star in his eye before he tells Joe he's very talented, with a wondrous smile brightening his face that Joe finds too irresistible to not kiss. 

As he watches Nicky sleep, his small sketchpad open to a blank page, Joe finds himself too caught up in looking to draw. Even inside and under covers, an old shirt of Joe's loose around Nicky's frame the same way it hung loose on Joe, Nicky shivers in his sleep. It's cold here, Andy confirmed that yesterday with her many layers on, and Joe moves closer, as careful as he can so to not disturb his sleeping lover.

"Nicolo?" he exhales, his free hand brushing Nicky's hair from his forehead. He's so asleep he doesn't stir, and Joe tugs their shared blanket further over Nicky, waiting for him to warm up and still. "You were right," Joe smiles softly to himself, tells Nicky as he sleeps. "The desert might've been nicer for a holiday."

When mere moments have passed, Joe leans to press a warm, loving kiss to Nicky's cheek. Each kiss, one after the other, spans their love over the centuries they've been alive. Each kiss reminds Joe of the two of them, of the many kisses they've shared throughout their years, and how many they will share well into the future. He can't think of the alternative right now, forcing his thoughts from immortality becoming fatal mortality to instead glance out the frosted windows, forcing his exhale to not shake.

When Nicky wakes, they will lie here until the sun is well into the sky and Joe will lie against Nicky as he reads whatever dogeared book he brought with him. They won't talk much, perfectly content to sit with one another and feel the warmth of the company, incomparable to nothing else; their love, and the way they love, is like that - _incomparable_.

And when noon breaks the sky with the most beautiful hues of pink and orange, Joe will drag Nicky from their bed to go into town. Because, as much as he likes the idea of Nicky bundled warm in one of Joe's old winter jackets, he likes the idea of Nicky having a warm jacket to call his own much more. If Nicky had had own jacket, he wouldn't need to borrow Joe's; until, inevitably, Joe steals Nicky's and begins the endless couple activity of clothes stealing that loops around and around.

Joe remembers the sight of Nicky yesterday, with his hair tousled and his hands shoved in his pockets because he didn't have gloves, and takes his time sketching the scene. It's nice to capture the moments with Nicky he most wants to remember in the next few hundred years, after many centuries ago when he realised he would never be able to hold onto all of them.

Joe smudges lead on his hand as Nicky slowly wakes, his eyelids fluttering open as the sun pours into the room. It's nearing sometime past seven, birds chirping happily in the distance and some of last night's cold chased away by the sun, leaving a gentler cold that isn't quite as bone deep as yesterday but cold, nonetheless.

Nicky, still tired, presses his head back into his pillow with tired force.

"G'morning," Joe smiles, forcing back a good humoured laugh. "Sleep well?"

"Bastard," Nicky groans into the pillow. "How long have you been awake?"

Joe sets his pencil down and leans towards Nicky, tone teasing and lighthearted. "Twenty minutes, at the least. Are you going to go back to sleep, my love?"

"I'm very tired, Joe," Nicky breathes out, and Joe's eyebrows knit together as he carefully closes his sketchbook. "I was - I was dreaming. I don't know quite what happened, but I didn't like it much, I think."

"You're safe, Nicolo," Joe murmurs, placing a hand on Nicky's shoulder and squeezing, letting his fingers dig in deep enough to be felt. Nicky's fingers brush Joe's hand, comforting and an intimacy to it that relaxes them both. "Sleep. I'm not going anywhere."

Nicky sighs, then pulls himself up and takes Joe's hand in his, their fingers slotting together so well that perfect doesn't cover it. "Show me what you're drawing, Joe?"

And Joe's a romantic, incurably so, yet he can't find the words to describe how his heart jumps each time he hears his name fall from lips he has lovingly and admiringly sketched hundreds upon hundreds of times.

"Well, I _was_ drawing you," Joe smiles and Nicky returns it. "But you moved, see."

"This is very good," Nicky assures, that familiar shine in his eye as he glances from the sketch to Joe. "It reminds me of…"

Joe knows. "Alaska."

" _Alaska,"_ Nicky breathes, and Joe knows he's recalling the few months they spent there from the way his expression softens almost immediately. "It's a beautiful drawing, Joe."

Joe knows his cheeks are probably flushed red so he closes the sketchbook and clears his throat. "Flattery will get you absolutely everywhere. What do you want, Nicolo?"

"Come back to sleep with me," Nicky smiles, so irresistibly _him_ that Joe wants to comply without a second thought. "We have all morning to lie here together. And I'm _tired_. Come back to sleep?"

Joe leans forward to press his forehead to Nicky's, taking a quiet moment between them to say all that words couldn't. _I love you_ doesn't come close to this, especially not when Nicky pulls away and initiates a kiss, his mouth unbelievably warm as Joe loses himself to it and to Nicky's hands brushing the stubble on his face. 

"You've convinced me," Joe says inches away from Nicky's mouth, not complaining when Nicky kisses him again. "All you had to do was ask, you know."

"I wanted to kiss you," Nicky whispers, and Joe wants to kiss him again for it. "Let's go back to sleep."

Nine hundred years to be cuddled together in a small, double bed somewhere in the middle of a particularly fierce Swedish winter. Nine hundred years of kissing to be sharing kisses here, each one setting Joe's heart alight with love like the so many before it. Nine hundred years, and Joe settles his arm over Nicky at his front and Nicky takes it the same he always has, holding Joe comfortingly to him.

"I have loved you for near millennia," Joe says into the warm skin of Nicky's neck.

"I love you, too," Nicky says back, and Joe can hear the smile in his voice.

Joe allows his eyes to close, shutting out the sunlight filtering through the half-closed curtains. Nicky's breathing slows until he's completely asleep, and Joe presses his face closer against him, inhaling deep.

Loved and loving for near a millennia - immortality or not, he knows he and Nicky would've found their way together. Like destiny. Like souls fated together. Forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just couldn't shake writing something else to tie this story together and then this happened, right now, at midnight. (all typos are, unfortunately, mine, sorry!!)
> 
> thanks so much for reading, and for all the kudos! genuinely love u guys so much for that ♡.

**Author's Note:**

> ♡


End file.
